: I think he was referring to telling it in a way that's more relatable. We're
: at a point now where not having the capacity for near-instant
: communication with someone feels weird, and not having it while having
: futuristic things around would feel even weirder, it would hurt a story's
: ability to resonate with its audience.

So... audiences can't identify with a mixture of perceived low tech and high tech?

I think what a lot of the greatest science fiction movies have done is, they took an idea and explained it so that the general audience could understand it while still telling a cool story. Science fiction fans would have already known what a simulated world is (Some would call it a holodeck, others might draw examples from Philip K. Dick's work) but it was the Matrix that introduced it to the world at large, with all the bullet-dodging wall-walking spinkicking awesomeness it entailed.

And the thing is, once you get an idea to stick in the popular consciousness, you don't have to explain what it is anymore. In the Matrix, you can't be told what the Matrix is, you have to be shown it. Over a decade later, Inception built on this. The movie didn't have to spend time explaining what a simulated reality is, so it instead lavished attention on explaining how the particular simulated reality called shared dreaming worked. Ariadne's crash course in shared dreaming is one of my favorite scenes, because it's infodumping done properly.

It's the same for other science fiction ideas. The concept of robots was fairly pedestrian by the time droids featured in Star Wars, thanks to how they captured the public's imagination in the 40's and 50's. But space fighters were something new, and Lucas gave them a proper introduction by modeling them after something the audience was already familiar with.

Tangent: This is kind of backward, because Lucas wasn't trying to introduce a concept. He just wanted to recreate the dogfights and trench runs from the movies of his youth. Still, if he hadn't introduced space fighters with such an easily grasped context, it'd be hard for later shows (Babylon 5) to tackle space fighters in a more esoteric context. (Oh, no, there's a fighter on my tail. Better spin my fighter around 180 degrees and blast him)

The problem, if we call it that, is when everyone continues to model their space fights after Star Wars. It's boring and it neglects a lot of the stories that can be told with different rules.